How much effort is it to create 1 simple fetch Quest?

[dspguy]

But what you fail to account for in your estimation of effort is a critical thing - every step is easy for one person's work, but this isn't one person's work. Each of steps is worked on by different people in different departments.

Can't emphasize this enough. While I don't work for SE, I can't imagine development is that different from the bigger picture.

There's the "story and lore" department. How does this fit into Eorzea? Do they tie in pre-existing characters? Do we need to make a new character? What are they like?

There's the art department - new items, new characters, new zone(?), new decorations, even the new thumbnails of the items. New emotes?

Then there's actually translating the lore, art (and other stuff I left out) into the actual code executed both server side and client side.

I'm also leaving out all the infrastructure that it took to even make all of that happen. While they did have to write their own engine for much of how this is done (and that work is already done), whatever that infrastructure is dictates how the half dozen departments probably have to work together to get a "simple 10 minute quest" live in the game.